Well, that was creepy of your step mum. Why she'd think a nine year old would get the wrong idea from a hug is beyond most people. When I first began learning about islam and read the quran I was amazed how obsessed it was as a whole with sex while at the same time demonising cultures who weren't obsessed and by and large wouldn't have these things enter their heads.
Yet they of course believe that it is the other cultures that are obsessed by sex, it is quite mind boggling when you sit down and think about it.
As to my step-mother, she has even accused my sister of fancying my father, again motivated I think in part by the closeness my sister has with my father....which wouldn't exist had anything of a sexual nature existed between them.
Mind you, my ex husband accused me of sleeping with my uncle and my father because he couldn't understand why I loved them that much. It was unfathomable to him, but again instead of laying this on Islam's door, I assumed it was, 1 = because he was psychotic, or 2 = because he had no sisters and thus no experience.
To your other point, It's a numbers game. How many people make up the West? Europe, Canada, America, and all the places in between? You go to a small rural village of 200 chances are it's not happening there. Go to a town of 50000, once in a blue moon. A city of a million plus, a several times a year you'll hear about it. The entire Western Hemisphere, you'll hear about it a lot more. There's one in Germany, there's one in Florida, there's one in England, there's two in France. It's common in the sense that we're aware it happens globally in an everyday way, but that's not the same thing as it being the reality for the majority of people.
The fact is the vast majority of people are not like this. We're not wired in this way.
I think you'd be surprised upon research just how common incest abuse of young females is, especially on father to daughter. You should take a look at Judith Lewis Harman's book 'Father Daughter Incest', I read it last year for an essay I had to write for criminology, and other papers (which I don't have to hand because my filing system is hilarious
) which showed that the figures were quite scary.
Between the period of 1970 to the time of publication of her book, I remember the sexual abuse cases in her meta-analysis were something like over 90% of them being father on daughter.
She also has a good chapter which speaks about the unwillingness of people, especially males, to believe the statistics are so high, because of their fear of what it says about them as future fathers. According to her, even Freud withdrew his previous belief in the truth of his patients, and instead began to see that they were merely fantasising about sex with their fathers, even though he had previously given credence to their life stories, of which rape at the hands of their fathers featured prominently. This trend was seen in many following studies, even when the girls had contracted STD's at the hands of their fathers, until after the 70's when feminists began to explore the topic.
It is of course not the majority, there are after all over 6 billion people on this planet, but the figures IIRC are in the 14-15% of women have been sexually abused by a family member, but I can't quite remember the total figure in which the father was the perpetrator, but it was the highest, followed second by brothers. The 2 mahrams for a girl in Islam.
Again, I am not stating the majority, just that it is not as small as one story from here, another from there, until it seems like an epidemic, child rape behind familial closed doors is more rife than the majority want to believe. Sad but true.
Good book.
Topic: Sexual Perversion in Patriarchy